My problem is that the Scribus Preflight says everything checks out for both. But Adobe says there are no embedded fonts, and IS says it is unable to be validated. When I contacted support:

Quote from: From Support

Listed below is the response from our IT department.

'The issue is that they converted all the text to paths. This is causing a problem with the preflight and would definitely not print. Please have them resolve and try again.

I don't know how I did this or what happened, but this is very frustrating, and I've been fighting with it for weeks trying to get it compliant. When I export it as a PDF, it has all the fonts embedded (figured out to disable the "subsets" in doc setup and pref). But Adobe says there are no embedded fonts.

On top of that, they require the interior to be grayscale, but I don't know if it's a problem yet because they say they can't even validate the file.

I really don't want to have to pay for Adobe when Scribus boasts compliant PDF/X. Help.

Edit: If it matters, the cover file has the same reqs, but CMYK instead of grayscale. It is image-only (no text frames) and it was accepted fine.

As you will see if you read it, Scribus doesn't always embed fonts that you tell it to (for various reasons) even if the font is embeddable.

I think one "quick" solution would be to use OTF fonts - instead of TTF fonts - but that might cause you a lot of issues with reformatting so it's probably best if you hold off trying that until someone with much more expertise in this area gets in touch.

Unfortunately this is one of those areas where Scribus expects the user to be an expert and know much more about the ins-and-outs than the average user would.

probably, trying to run a 64 bit application on a 32 bit OS...or you did not download scribus from the official scribus download site (by following the links on https://www.scribus.net .

I'm not exactly part of Geek Squad, but I know my computer, thank you. The program itself worked fine when I opened new projects, or projects that were considerably smaller in size, but not my main one.

Anyway, I think I found a way around it. Still testing out my theories, but will update if it proves correct.

i'm not exactly a computer god, but i know most people (me included) make errors when using computers. thank you.

and i know that if you correctly download the correct scribus installer and your windows is not broken, the current scribus development version will work on a windows computer.many people (myself not included) have done it in the past and are doing it right now somewhere around the world.

so: you're doing something wrong.whether you like it or not.

and the error might simply be, that you forgot to tell us that scribus crashes when opening a specific document and "crashes before it even loads" refers to that document and not scribus itself.